Abstract
This paper examines the correlation between musical dissonance and auditory roughness-the most significant factor of psychoacoustic dissonance- and the contribution of the latter to algorithmic composition. We designed an empirical study to assess how auditory roughness correlates with human judgments of dissonance in natural musical stimuli on the sound object time scale. The results showed a statistically significant correlation between roughness and listeners' judgments of dissonance for quasi-harmonic sounds. This paper concludes by presenting two musical applications of auditory roughness in algorithmic composition, in particular to supervise the vertical recombination of sound objects in the software earGram. Copyright:

Abstract

Abstract
GROOVE IS A SENSATION OF MOVEMENT OR WANTing to move when we listen to certain types of music; it is central to the appreciation of many styles such as Jazz, Funk, Latin, and many more. To better understand the mechanisms that lead to the sensation of groove, we explore the relationship between groove and systematic microtiming deviations. Manifested as small, intentional deviations in timing, systematic microtiming is widely considered within the music community to be a critical component of music performances that groove. To investigate the effect of microtiming on the perception of groove we synthesized typical rhythm patterns for Jazz, Funk, and Samba with idiomatic microtiming deviation patterns for each style. The magnitude of the deviations was parametrically varied from nil to about double the natural level. In two experiments, untrained listeners and experts listened to all combinations of same and different music and microtiming style and magnitude combinations, and rated liking, groove, naturalness, and speed. Contrary to a common and frequently expressed belief in the literature, systematic microtiming led to decreased groove ratings, as well as liking and naturalness, with the exception of the simple short-long shuffle Jazz pattern. A comparison of the ratings between the two listener groups revealed this effect to be stronger for the expert listener group than for the untrained listeners, suggesting that musical expertise plays an important role in the perception and appreciation of micro timing in rhythmic patterns.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
The practice of harmonic mixing is a technique used by DJs for the beat-synchronous and harmonic alignment of two or more pieces of music. In this paper, we present a new harmonic mixing method based on psychoacoustic principles. Unlike existing commercial DJ-mixing software which determine compatible matches between songs via key estimation and harmonic relationships in the circle of fifths, our approach is built around the measurement of musical consonance at the signal level. Given two tracks, we first extract a set of partials using a sinusoidal model and average this information over sixteenth note temporal frames. Then within each frame, we measure the consonance between all combinations of dyads according to psychoacoustic models of roughness and pitch commonality. By scaling the partials of one track over ± 6 semitones (in 1/8th semitone steps), we can determine the optimal pitch-shift which maximises the consonance of the resulting mix. Results of a listening test show that the most consonant alignments generated by our method were preferred to those suggested by an existing commercial DJ-mixing system.